Years ago, when I was an editor at The Austin American-Statesman, I had to decide whether to run George Will, the conservative columnist at The Washington Post, on a regular basis to balance the pages with perspectives from the left and the right.

I had admired Will’s writing but more and more I had to force myself to read him – still do.  My struggle began many years before with a piece that suggested to me that he fundamentally misunderstood where the country was headed.  Will had written at the height of the Reagan Revolution – I’m paraphrasing – that the country had entered a conservative era that would last for generations.

But even then, women were remaking the workplace, the growing HispanicLatino population was continuing to vote for progressive Democratic candidates, gays and lesbians were becoming regular features on primetime television and black Americans were increasing, if not in number, certainly their influence on the mainstream culture.  I chose not to run his columns.

As with many people, Will, bless his heart, still does not understand the profound demographic change the country is undergoing.  Oh, he and others understand it conceptually, but since they see it from their mostly white, Anglo perspective, they view it as some sort of numbers game instead of what it is, a cultural shift.  In a recent column, he advanced the notion that admissions-programs that seek to include more minorities in the nation’s universities and colleges hurt minorities themselves.

Beyond the admissions column, Will has been in the news of late.  His wife is advising the presidential campaign of Rick Perry – if you can call it a campaign at this point.  Will has savaged Perry’s opponent, Mitt Romney, with writing that even in the incestuous cesspool of Washington is too politically obvious.  His column devastating Romney is the symptom of a Washington that has become so insular that even a President elected to implement radical change has been hampered by entrenched special interests – like Will himself.

The plain truth is that George Will lives in a world already past, not passing.  In his world, the debate over what some denigrate as affirmative action is still worth having – this in a day when the officers of any major institution or organization not including the country’s new demographics in their business plans are violating their fiduciary duties.  Columnists and journalists, too, have an inherent fiduciary duty to the public to make sense of how an institution like the University of Texas whose student population is 19 percent HispanicLatino in a state that is almost 42 percent HispanicLatino.

Now is the time to accelerate inclusion of demographic change, not engage in sophistic debates about it.  Individuals in decision-making positions not fully incorporating HispanicLatinos into their operations will be operation-less soon enough.  The lesson applies to the whole country – a country that has been far different far longer than Will realizes.

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